[madcaptenor]

R: pirates

Actually, there was an earlier language named S, for "statistics". R was intended as a successor to S - I suppose T would have been the natural name, then, or S++ - but also the inventors had first names starting with R.

I've heard people speculate it has something to do with correlation coefficients, which it doesn't, but that r comes from "reversion" or "regression": https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/368224/why-is-r-us...

[bluenose69]

In their paper (1), the authors state that R is to relate to S, but also to, in their words, "part to celebrate our own efforts". (Note their first names!). It's a great paper, by the way.

1. Ihaka, Ross, and Robert Gentleman. “R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics.” Journal of Computational & Graphical Statistics 5, no. 3 (1996): 299–314.

[madcaptenor]

I haven’t actually read it! I had assumed that they named it R and just left other people to notice that their names started with R, but no such false modesty for them.

[mjhay]

"R" wound up being a terrible name in terms of Google-ability and such, although it can be excused given that it was created in 1993. Csharp and Fsharp have no such excuse, though.